Roe at 40: Human Dignity Hangs in the balance

The final of three posts that discuss 40 years of Roe v. Wade examines a wonderful piece that ran last Friday written by Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary .“40 Years After Roe, Human Dignity Hangs in the Balance” can be read in its entirety and is well worth your time.

The best section of this analysis is answering the question that pro-abortionists are prone to ask from time to time: why won’t this battle end, why hasn’t it ended? Dr. Mohler offers five responses.

#1. Roe was so radical it galvanized pro-lifers. “Within months of Roe, an organized pro-life movement came into shape, looking for any means of limiting and eventually ending the termination of unborn life.”

#2. Roe had the unintended consequence of awakening a sleeping giant: Evangelicals. The Catholic Church, which had done virtually all the heavy lifting, now had a partner. Mohler writes, “With remarkable speed, evangelicals soon educated themselves on the issue and then mobilized themselves both politically and culturally.”

#3. “The sheer scale of the death toll sears the pro-life conscience,” he writes. Many people have at least heard something about there being “over 50 million abortions,” (The actual figure is over 55 million). What is becoming better known—and very, very frightening—are “Reports last year [that] indicated that over 40 percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, a rate that increases to almost 60 percent of pregnancies among African-American women.”

#4. “[A]bortion has proved to be exactly what pro-life activists warned it would be: a deadly threat to human dignity that would target specific populations. Prenatal testing has produced a deadly reality for unborn babies considered less than acceptable by their parents.”

#5. The impact of technology. “[P]owerful imaging technologies now allow a look inside the womb, a privilege unknown to previous generations,” Mohler observes. “That window has transformed the equation, as millions of parents have seen their unborn children and witnessed the miracle of life.”

Of course, all that notwithstanding abortion remains legal. Mohler gives us this powerful insight:

We have much ground to recover, but the only foundation for a recovery of human dignity is an affirmation of the fact that every single human being is made in God’s image and is of sacred worth from the moment of fertilization until natural death.